Hating ‘elites’ is stupid, and it’s no crime to say so … yet

Spare a thought for the elite. Worshipped on influencer-gram, but the perennial baddies of much contemporary politics. Elites, the Trumpian narrative goes, promote counterintuitive trade policy, disdain the unskilled and avoid the good, honest transfats consumed by real people.

Elites cop it from the left of politics, too. For the left, the elites are people with “privilege”, who should be checking it – presumably into a metaphysical cloakroom.

Down with the elites! Credit: Illustration: Andrew Dyson

The concept of an oppressive elite is timeless – there are always those who are doing better than us. The drive to overthrow them is epochal, says Peter Turchin, a Russian-American complexity scientist who studies the trends of history using a mathematical and statistical methodology he and his colleagues call cliodynamics.

It comes about when a society produces too many contenders for elite status – more than there are positions of prestige, or spots in the chairman’s lounge, to fill. The elites then scuffle among themselves in a way that can bring down a society. The common people are often invoked – witness the appeal for proletarian justice in the French and Russian revolutions – but the real battle is between the establishment elites and a counter-elite that seeks to replace it.

Sure enough, whoever wins the US election, the elites – one elite or another – will be in charge.

The way these elite skirmishes manifest is often so strange and full of contradictions that they are best understood through the caricatures and exaggerations of fiction. Before the much belaboured 1984, George Orwell published Animal Farm, in which the animals overthrow the exploitative humans only for the clever pigs to become the oppressors in turn.

More recently, American writer Lionel Shriver released Mania. The book was shot down by left-leaning reviewers even before it could land. But it has also been misunderstood by those who now celebrate Shriver because she was once described as a “woke-baiting provocateur”.

As usual, the crude partisans betray themselves with their own lack of subtlety. Mania is an interesting book because it skewers a notion, not merely a side.

Shriver has a history of writing books that delve uncomfortably into current social issues and fads, exaggerating their extremes and extrapolating their consequences until we can’t help but see ourselves right now as we actually are. Her most famous book, We Need to Talk about Kevin, warned against sociopathic Australian prime ministers. Jokes – of course it was about school shootings, emotional detachment and parental responsibility. A more recent book, The Mandibles, explores America’s infatuation with national debt and a holy idea of itself as the world’s social justice warrior.

Mania is set in an alternative 2011 to 2023, in which the “Mental Parity” movement has made preferring intelligence – “smartism” – unfashionable. As the story progresses, the Mental Parity movement declares that no one is smarter than anyone else. Labelling people or things as less intelligent or even “the D-word”, dumb, becomes a hate crime. Discriminating on the basis of intellect and, eventually, qualifications, when hiring, becomes illegal. Education becomes meaningless as tests and basic attainment requirements are abolished. Achievement of any kind – being “brain-vain” – is condemned.

The story is narrated by Pearson Converse, who considers herself intellectually unremarkable but has an irrepressible contrarian streak. So when the Mental Parity movement, characterised by adherents as “the last great civil rights fight”, becomes mainstream, Converse is compelled to mock its absurdities while kicking back against its diktats.

The diktats rapidly multiply. Yesterday’s acceptable euphemism for the less intellectually endowed – for instance, “the otherwise” – becomes today’s offensive slur. Even inanimate objects can no longer be sharp because that could be understood as intellectually superior. And yes, the reader is supposed to draw the comparison with racial descriptors, which start out by “problematising” malicious usages and end up with even the best-intentioned among us at sea on whether visual descriptors of skin colour, such as “black” or “brown”, are acceptable.

Opportunists, such as the narrator’s best friend, Emory, latch onto the movement for personal gain. Despite initially sharing Converse’s disdain, Emory becomes one of Mental Parity’s most prominent mouthpieces. She is a commentator in the tradition of Tucker Carlson, who expressed “hatred” for Donald Trump in private while praising him in public, and many other mealy-mouthed media types who cut their jib to their job prospects.

Stuck presenting a “graveyard arts slot” on radio at the beginning of the story, Emory deploys silver-tongued rationalisations of the new regime to become a nationally celebrated CNN presenter. And, of course, the conclusion is inescapable that, just as in our timeline, these opportunists shut down debate more than they promote it. There is no natural end to self-censorship, pre-emptive censorship or to the new extremes for which the opportunists will reach out to keep feeding their fashionable editorials.

The pressure builds on Converse to say out loud what she thinks and sees. The only things holding her back are the financial imperative to hold on to her livelihood teaching literature at a university, where students are ready to pounce on every wrong word, and the threat of losing her children to the state.

Eventually it all goes wrong, as we knew it must for the story to go anywhere. But the point is made: anti-elitism is stupid – there’s that word – and it’s good to live in a world where calling it stupid is not a crime.

Shriver brings Turchin’s theory of cliodynamics to life in fictional form and delivers a conclusion that the historical scientist can’t allow himself to draw. There will always be competition for elite status, in any society. The consequences are ours to live with, Shriver warns, when we allow ideological purity to replace individual quality and ability in the eternal status war. Better for us all is to reconsider what status is, and how it is conferred.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.

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